In today’s age of cutthroat online competition, one has no other choice but to rely on e-commerce stores and small businesses. However, instead of just using automation in the shipping and packaging department of your business, it can be more effective to put your email marketing efforts on autopilot as well.
Yes, marketing automation is achievable. It will allow you to grow your business at scale without the added hassle of having to market your product every single day. These days a lot of companies rely on digital marketing. It is especially true for e-commerce stores.
Before you embark on the journey to a lower customer acquisition cost and a higher lifetime customer value, it is essential to understand just how marketing automation can help your business.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a form of digital marketing that automates various stages of marketing during the customer life cycle.
It’s mainly conducted through auto-responders like Active Campaign and MailChimp.
The idea is that a lead will arrive on your website or landing page, leave their email address and the result is that you can send them a sequence of emails over a period of time.
Today, we will share with you 5 ways in which marketing automation can benefit your business.
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High customer retention:
In any business venture, it’s essential to first measure the lifetime value of the customer rather than looking at the acquisition cost and the first sale. The higher the customer retention rate, the more value you will be able to obtain from a customer over a lifetime. You have to undertake efforts to retain each customer for as long a time as financially viable.
The best way to do so is to automate the customer retention and customer service process.
Once this is done, you can be sure that proverbially no customer will be left behind.
There are various automated tasks that you can undertake to achieve higher customer acquisition and retention rates. This includes-
- Contacting customers who abandoned the cart with an email sequence
- Re-targeting customers with pay per click
- Creating lookalike audiences with the emails you’ve collected
- Creating specific tags for customers and potential customers based on their behaviour and then marketing to them based on that behaviour.
Fortunately, with the help of marketing automation, you can automate all these tasks. This means that whether you’re dealing with five customers or whether you’re dealing with 50,000 customers, you can still cater to them easily. It will allow you to expand your bottom line at an exponential pace.
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Real-time result monitoring:
Traditional marketing methods tend to have opaque statistics.
With the help of marketing automation, it is easy to monitor real-time marketing information. You can track the stats across various channels and metrics like:
- Cost per opened email
- Cost per click
- The average cost of traffic
- Cost per acquisition
With the help of marketing automation, you can monitor real-time stats from anywhere around the world.
You can modify your campaigns in real-time as well and this will ensure that you can increase key-performance indicators and keep in constant contact with your customer base.
It will allow you to focus on the right demographics, and create custom marketing methods dependent on behaviour.
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Automatic induction in welcome programs:
When a customer first visits your website or e-commerce store, he/she might not be familiar with your store.
That is why it is crucial to conduct proper brand building exercise.
Only when you can build a trustworthy relationship with your customer, you can expect any revenue from him/her.
The question is how to do so?
The best way is to use a welcome email, followed by an email sequence explaining how your company works, the company culture and why customer’s should choose your business over your competitors.
The automated nature of the welcome program will ensure that you do not have to devote dedicated labour time to the customer. You can use various tools to your advantage like:
- Email newsletter series
- Brand awareness emails
- personalized discounts
- Targeted content marketing
The on-boarding email automation can be designed in such a way that all of these tasks are automated.
It will help you convert the customer and also allow for a higher percentage of returning customers.
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Automation of Multi-Channel Campaigns:
These days, relying on a single marketing method is a mistake. You need to target customers across various marketing platforms. Marketing automation allows you to track and automate processes across various marketing channels.
It will allow you to track customers across different mediums like:
- Social media platforms
- Blogs, websites, and search engines
- Mobiles, tablets, and desktops
Targeting customers on all of these avenues is only possible when you use automation in your marketing efforts.
The cookie-based tracking systems can help you do so. With the help of marketing across various channels, it is easy to build trust with potential customers and get a sale.
There are multiple advantages of using such automated cookie-based advertising methods like:
- Using push notifications
- Offering hyper-relevant recommendations
- Serving targeted content
- Segmenting potential customer according to their profile
- Initiating interaction with the customer on various platforms
With the help of automation, the right multi-channel campaign can help you gain an edge over your competition. That is why; automation these days is not a luxury but a necessity.
As you can see, marketing automation can help your business grow.
It can also provide you with an edge over the competitors in more ways than one.
If you want to expand your business or your e-commerce store, and take advantage of the benefits highlighted above, marketing automation is the way to go about it.
A holistic marketing strategy provides the best results but the cost-effectiveness of email marketing automation in terms of allowing you to stay in constant contact with your prospects is like no other.
